E-Mail This Article to a Friend 21st-century blacklist The Bush administration uses a federal-employee fundraising campaign to deputize charities in the war on terror BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

THIS MONTH, Bostonians working for federal agencies — anything from the US Postal Service to the Department of Transportation — will fill out pledge cards, as they do every fall, to participate in the most successful workplace-fundraising program ever established: the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC). Participants choose the amount they wish to contribute, along with the recipients of their generosity; their donations are then deducted regularly from their paychecks over the following year. In Boston alone, more than 300 charities benefit from the arrangement, which helps fund everything from the Boston Symphony Orchestra to domestic-violence-prevention programs at Casa Myrna Vazquez. Last year roughly 30,000 Boston-area employees gave more than $2 million; nationwide the CFC raised a quarter of a billion dollars.

Most of these benevolent federal employees are unaware that the Bush administration has usurped their charitable program and turned it into a weapon in the war on terror. Today, organizations that accept personal contributions allotted on those pledge cards must agree to root out suspected terrorists from their payrolls and partner charities. They must check every employee, and every organization they fund, against terror-watch lists, to certify that they are not providing any money, in any way, to any suspected evildoer.

"They’re trying to deputize charitable organizations to combat terror," says Chip Pitts, board chair for Amnesty International USA. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has denounced the requirement as a "blacklist." The National Council of Nonprofit Associations (NCNA) has put out a statement denouncing the policy as a threat to core American values: "Drawing a secret line between appropriate and inappropriate association for the purpose of a ‘blacklist’ is fundamentally undemocratic," it says.

Those three organizations, along with 20 others, have withdrawn from the CFC program in protest, and intend to file a lawsuit within the next three weeks. They include the Boston-based Our Bodies, Ourselves collective, as well as the Sierra Club, Catholic Peace Ministry, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Brennan Center for Justice, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the National Women’s Law Center, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. They and other critics say that the government is intruding on private donors’ giving to private organizations — and doing so while providing virtually no guidance on how to comply with the new regulations.

Behind the scenes, CFC director Mara Patermaster is working to forge a compromise to keep the controversy from exploding — especially right now, as employees are considering their participation for the coming year (and discovering that some of the above-listed groups are missing from the recipient list). But at least publicly, Patermaster has been crystal clear. In a July 31 New York Times article, she explained, for the first time, that charities are expected to "take affirmative action" that "would specifically include" checking employee names against terror-watch lists put out by the US, the United Nations, and the European Union. In an August 9 letter to the ACLU, Patermaster defended this policy, arguing that "since September 11 ... the Government has learned that terrorists and their supporters have utilized charitable organizations as one vehicle for transferring funds, directly or indirectly, for terrorist purposes."

"This really tells you about the climate of fear, that the CFC feels that it needs to engage charities in its fight against terrorism," says Emily Whitfield, ACLU’s national spokesperson.

"This rule puts nonprofits in a position that’s very tenuous," says Erica Greeley, NCNA’s director of strategic-policy planning. "It’s a pretty serious situation when a nonprofit has to compromise its principles for money."

THE HUNDREDS of local Boston charities accustomed to receiving CFC funds now find themselves in a precarious situation. They want the money; they don’t want to support terrorists; and they don’t want to violate anyone’s privacy. But most important, they have not been told how they are supposed to comply with the new requirement.

Those organizations did, however, all agree to the new policy last October, whether they realized it or not. That’s when the CFC added a check-off box to the form on which member charities annually affirm that they operate on the up-and-up — that they use generally accepted accounting principles, for instance. Without advance warning, the form included a new promise, that the charities "do not knowingly employ individuals or contribute funds to organizations found on terrorist-related lists."

The other 20 or so items on that certification form reflect the CFC’s desire to ensure the accountability of the charities it funds, says Marshall Strauss, who spent the past year as chair of the National CFC Committee and is now director of the Human & Civil Rights Organizations of America Federation. The terror-watch-list requirement could be seen in the same light, he says — except that it originated not with the CFC but with an executive order issued by President Bush. "The government does indeed have a legitimate interest in blocking charitable money from getting to terrorist organizations," says Strauss.

Most organizations — if they even noticed the addition — shrugged it off, since they certainly weren’t knowingly employing terrorists. Only Patermaster’s recent comments alerted them to the need for active list-checking. And now that they know what’s expected of them — they don’t know what’s expected of them. The CFC’s national office has offered little guidance, and now won’t comment at all, citing potential pending lawsuits. "It’s still not clear to us how we would comply even if we wanted to," says Pitts.

Recipient groups’ questions begin with the terror-watch lists themselves. One such list, maintained by the US Treasury Department, runs in three columns of small print filling 165 pages (see www.treas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/sdn/t11sdn.pdf). Many of the names include multiple aliases. The different lists have not been put into compatible databases, so the task of poring through them cannot be automated. Making matters even more difficult, they are updated often, and on different schedules. "A concern has been expressed that the government lists are awkwardly presented," says Strauss. "Awkward is an understatement."